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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Do you mean to tell me if the woman trains for a couple years, and is healthy / responsive to training, she wouldn't be stronger than the majority of men that don't train, or are just fooling around in the gym / not really progressively overloading?

No. Do the math, and it shakes out that elite women only reach the 50th percentile of men in a bunch of categories. Even if they match strength, they are still smaller at the same height. The average woman at 5’10” (1.5% US population) isn’t the same weight as the average guy at that height. Men also bring anatomical advantages, too, in the form of denser and thicker bones (useful in a fight). Go do BJJ or Judo and the differences will be obvious to you. Or, watch elite women’s Basketball or Soccer. They display less athleticism than just about any non-selective high school varsity team with a class of a couple hundred.

Are dudes supposed to just walk into a gym, being sedentary, and start benching 200?

Nope, but (fit) women walk into a gym and start benching <45 pounds. Seriously!

Don't most women just avoid actual strength training / bulking out of temperament/desire for their body to look a certain way

Yes, but that doesn’t matter when women are much smaller on average, and much much weaker even at the same weight. They can’t make up the difference, and there is no way to literally grow a thicker skull. I would not want to roll the dice in a street fight on those odds.

True, some other commenters have mentioned other things matter beside isolated muscle strength, like skull thickness / bone size etc. I wasn't considering that other factors determine how well you can express your isolated muscular strength in combat.

I'd like to think black widow is some kind of mutant on the down low, has some mutations that make her bones denser/thicker, more like a man's, without being enough to actually be considered an MCU mutant. But at that point we are outside the realm of our world's reality anyway. Heck that's what my head canon is for most male action stars like Ethan hunt in mission impossible. I just head canon that he has high bone density mutations and maybe some kind of fast metabolism for healing injuries, but not so much that it isn't possible in our world if all the genetic factors came together in the same person.